The Pressure to Excel: When Success Feels Like Survival

“To tie your worth to achievements is a recipe for suffering.” ~Brad Bizjack

Children don’t just learn mathematics, science, and languages in school. They also learn what success feels like, what failure means, who they believe they are, and sometimes, whether they think they belong.

When I was in primary school, my school introduced academic streaming. If there were four grade seven classes, the highest-performing students were placed in the first stream, followed by the second, third, and fourth streams based on academic performance.

On paper, it made perfect sense. Students would learn alongside peers of similar academic ability, and …

“To tie your worth to achievements is a recipe for suffering.” ~Brad Bizjack

Children don’t just learn mathematics, science, and languages in school. They also learn what success feels like, what failure means, who they believe they are, and sometimes, whether they think they belong.

When I was in primary school, my school introduced academic streaming. If there were four grade seven classes, the highest-performing students were placed in the first stream, followed by the second, third, and fourth streams based on academic performance.

On paper, it made perfect sense. Students would learn alongside peers of similar academic ability, and teachers could tailor their instruction accordingly.

There was just one catch: your place was never guaranteed. At the end of every examination period, the rankings were reviewed, and students were moved accordingly.

You could find yourself promoted to the top stream or demoted to another class depending on your performance. It didn’t matter where you had been the previous term. Every exam was a fresh judgment. The entire school knew who was in which class. If someone moved up, everyone knew. If someone dropped, everyone knew that too.

When the system was introduced, I found myself in the top stream.

Looking back, I suspect I was probably where I belonged at that particular moment. But if I’m being completely honest, I also know I spent most of my time barely holding on. Had I been placed in the second stream, I probably would have thrived better there academically. Instead, I lived with the constant fear of slipping.

To my young mind, dropping to the second stream wasn’t simply changing classrooms. It would have been public failure. I worried about disappointing my parents. I worried about what my teachers would think. More than anything, I dreaded the whispers from other students. The shame felt unimaginable, so every exam became less about learning and more about survival.

That survival shaped everything. The goal was no longer to understand the material but to pass the exam and keep your seat. If you walked into our classroom during break time, you would find most of us bent over our desks finishing assignments. Taking work home meant sacrificing precious hours that could be spent studying ahead for the next test.

The expectations extended beyond the classroom, too. There was an unspoken understanding among the teachers: you were the bright students. You should be able to teach yourself, read ahead, and grasp concepts with minimal explanation. Excellence wasn’t simply expected; it was assumed.

Even then, there was something about the second stream that fascinated me. There were students there who were clearly capable of joining the top class, yet somehow, they never quite did.

At the time, I couldn’t understand it. Why wouldn’t you want to be in the “best” class? Secretly, though, I envied them. They laughed more. They seemed less burdened by the constant pressure to prove themselves.

Looking back, it almost felt as though they had an unspoken agreement among themselves: don’t drop to the third stream, but don’t move to the top stream either. And if someone from the top class slipped, don’t make room for them to bring all that unnecessary pressure with them. Whether that pact truly existed or not hardly matters now. As a child, that’s how it felt.

As an adult, I wonder whether they understood something I didn’t. Perhaps they instinctively recognized that every achievement comes with a maintenance cost.

In the second stream, they could consistently excel. They had room to breathe. They could enjoy learning without carrying the constant fear of losing a title they had worked so hard to earn. Meanwhile, those of us in the top stream lived under a different kind of pressure. From the perspective of the rest of the school, we were the students everyone admired. Inside our classroom, however, many of us were simply trying not to become the weakest student in the strongest group.

What made the experience even stranger was that there were really two rankings. To the rest of the school, I belonged to the top class. Inside that classroom, I was often near the bottom. You could be ranked thirty-third out of one hundred and fifty students in the entire grade, which by any reasonable measure was an excellent result, yet still find yourself thirty-third out of forty-five students in the top stream.

Technically, you were among the highest-performing students in the school. Emotionally, you felt like you were failing. Teachers looked at your report and insisted, “You can do better.” My parents expected more because I was in the top class. No one seemed to notice that I was already competing against the strongest students in the school.

It was my first experience of discovering that you can occupy one of the highest places in a system while feeling as though you’re at the very bottom of it. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if I’ve been carrying that lesson ever since.

The other two streams occupied very different places in my mind. The third stream was almost invisible to me, and I suspect it was to many of my classmates as well. It simply wasn’t part of my mental map. I never imagined dropping that far, so I rarely thought about it. The fourth stream, however, stayed with me for entirely different reasons.

Before academic streaming, we had all been classmates. Some had been my desk mates. Some had been my friends. We had learned together without attaching so much meaning to where each of us stood academically. Looking back now, I often wonder what it felt like for the children who suddenly found themselves labeled as the weakest in the school. I never thought to ask then. I wish I had.

Part of the reason I noticed that class at all was because we were occasionally expected to help them. You would be paired with another student to explain a concept or work through an exercise together.

Those moments stayed with me because their classroom felt so different from ours. There were fewer students, which meant each child received more attention from the teacher. The room seemed brighter, more colorful, and, somehow, more patient.

Lessons moved at a pace that allowed questions to be asked without embarrassment. From where I stood, it felt as though those students had permission to say, “I don’t understand,” or “Can you explain that again?”

In the top stream, those words felt almost unthinkable. We were the bright students. We were expected to understand, to keep up, and to figure things out on our own.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether the greatest privilege in that school wasn’t being considered the smartest. It was feeling safe enough to admit when you weren’t.

People often ask how to get to the top. Far fewer ask what it costs to stay there. Every promotion creates higher expectations. Every successful business brings new responsibilities. Every public achievement invites comparison.

Success isn’t simply something you attain; it often becomes something you have to maintain.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether this is why positions of power, influence, or being “the best” have never particularly appealed to me. For years, I interpreted that as a lack of ambition. Now I’m not so sure.

Perhaps somewhere around the age of eleven, I began associating standing at the top with the fear of falling. I don’t know if that classroom is where that story began, but I can see how it may have shaped the way I move through the world today.

That reflection has also changed the way I think about achievement itself. As children, we assumed everyone was sitting for the same exam under the same conditions. We didn’t see the classmate who had a tutor waiting at home, the one who lived ten minutes from school while another spent hours traveling, or the child with educated parents who could help with homework every evening.

We didn’t notice who had a quiet room to study in, who had younger siblings to care for, or who arrived at school carrying burdens invisible to the rest of us. We thought the rankings measured intelligence. Looking back, I think they measured much more than that.

There was another cost I didn’t recognize until years later. Friendships rarely had the chance to grow because competition occupied so much space between us. Every exam had the potential to change where you sat, and every mark someone else gained felt as though it could become one you lost.

Without meaning to, many of us learned to see classmates as rivals before we ever had the chance to know them as friends. I sometimes wonder how many relationships were quietly sacrificed at the altar of achievement and whether any report card could ever have been worth that.

Years later, I met one of my former classmates in culinary school. He had been one of the brightest students in our class. Long before academic streaming, I remember him as the boy who could draw beautifully.

He came from what, in our young minds, looked like privilege. His parents picked him up from school in a car while most of us squeezed into public buses. He bought lunch at school while many of us carried ours from home. By every measure we understood as children, he seemed destined for a different future.

I was in culinary school because I had deferred my university admission, and my parents encouraged me to spend the year doing something I genuinely enjoyed. I loved every minute of it. Culinary school never felt like settling. It felt like an unexpected gift.

His circumstances, however, were different. We never spoke about them, and I never asked. We exchanged pleasantries, then carried on with our day. I remember noticing that he smoked and drank, but I have no idea what those things meant in the context of his life. The older I’ve become, the more careful I’ve tried to be about confusing observation with understanding.

For years, I told myself I had sensed shame in him. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps what I was really seeing was my own confusion. How could someone I had assumed would become a doctor, engineer, or architect end up in the same culinary classroom as me?

More importantly, why did that surprise me at all? Who had taught me that brilliant children follow straight lines or that certain paths are somehow worth more than others? Perhaps that was another lesson hidden within those school years: we weren’t only being taught how to achieve. We were also being taught what success was supposed to look like.

The truth is, I don’t know what became of him. I don’t know whether culinary school was his first choice, his second chance, or simply the road that made sense at the time. I don’t know whether he felt proud to be there, disappointed, or perfectly content. What I do know is that seeing him forced me to question the stories I had carried with me since childhood—stories about talent, potential, and the kinds of lives people were expected to live.

Looking back now, I don’t think this essay is really about academic streaming. It is about the quiet ways childhood shapes us. We leave school believing we have learned mathematics, English, and science, but we also carry away ideas about success, failure, belonging, and what kind of person we are allowed to become. Some of those lessons serve us. Others deserve to be questioned.

I don’t know whether that classroom is the reason I have never chased titles, influence, or the highest seat at the table. Human beings are rarely shaped by a single experience. But I do know that when I look back, I can see one of the places where my relationship with achievement began to take form.

Understanding that hasn’t made me less ambitious. It has made me more intentional. I’ve stopped measuring my life against definitions of success that leave me anxious and started building one that allows me to breathe.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of revisiting our childhood—not to blame it for the adults we’ve become, but to understand them a little better.

Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.